Why Segregation Matters: Poverty and Educational Inequality

Authors:
Gary Orfield, Chungmei Lee

Date Published:
January 13, 2005

The high level of poverty among children, together with many housing policies and practices which excludes poor people from most communities, mean that students in inner city schools face isolation not only from the white community but also from middle class schools. Minority children are far more likely than whites to grow up in persistent poverty. Since few whites have direct experience with concentrated poverty schools, it is very important to examine research about its effects.

Introduction

Much
of the discussion about school reform in the U.S. in the past two
decades has been about racial inequality. President Bush has promised
that the No Child Left Behind Act and the forthcoming expansion of high
stakes testing to high schools can end the “soft racism of low
expectations.” Yet a disproportionate number of the schools being
officially labeled as persistent failures and facing sanctions under
this program are segregated minority schools. Large city school systems
are engaged in massive efforts to break large segregated high poverty
high schools into small schools, hoping that it will create a setting
better able to reduce inequality, while others claim that market forces
operating through charter schools and private schools could end racial
inequalities even though both of these are even more segregated than
public schools and there is no convincing evidence for either of these
claims. More and more of the still standing court orders and plans for
desegregated schools are being terminated or challenged in court, and
the leaders of the small number of high achieving segregated schools in
each big city or state are celebrated. The existence of these schools
is being used to claim that we can have general educational success
within the existing context of deepening segregation. Clearly the basic
assumption is that separate schools can be made equal and that we need
not worry about the abandonment of the movement for integration whose
history was celebrated so extensively last year on the 50th anniversary
of the Brown decision even as the schools continued to resegregate.
There has been a continuous pattern of deepening segregation for black
and Latino students now since the 1980s.

What if this basic assumption is wrong? What if the
Supreme Court was correct a half century ago in its conclusion that
segregated schools were “inherently unequal”? What if Martin Luther
King’s many statements about how segregation harms both the segregator
and the segregated, drastically limits opportunity, and does not
provide the basis for building a successful interracial society are
correct? What if the Supreme Court’s sweeping conclusion in the 2003
University of Michigan case that there is compelling evidence that
diversity improves the education of all students is true and applies
with even greater force to public schools?

If, however, it is wrong to assume that segregation is
irrelevant and policies that ignore that fact simply punish the victims
of segregation because they fail to take into account many of the
causes of the inequality, then current policy is being built on the
foundation that it cannot produce the desired results and may even
compound the existing inequalities. We believe this to be true.
Segregated schools are unequal and there is very little evidence of any
success in creating “separate but equal” outcomes on a large scale.

One of the common misconceptions over the issue of
resegregation of schools is that many people treat it as simply a
change in the skin color of the students in a school. If skin color
were not systematically linked to other forms of inequality, it would,
of course, be of little significance for educational policy.
Unfortunately that is not and never has been the nature of our society.
Socioeconomic segregation is a stubborn, multidimensional and deeply
important cause of educational inequality. U.S. schools are now 41
percent nonwhite and the great majority of the nonwhite students attend
schools which now show substantial segregation. Levels of segregation
for black and Latino students have been steadily increasing since the
l980s, as we have shown in a series of reports. Achievement scores are
strongly linked to school racial composition and so is the presence of
highly qualified and experienced teachers. The nation’s shockingly high
dropout problem is squarely concentrated in heavily minority high
schools in big cities. The high level of poverty among children,
together with many housing policies and practices which excludes poor
people from most communities, mean that students in inner city schools
face isolation not only from the white community but also from middle
class schools. Minority children are far more likely than whites to
grow up in persistent poverty. Since few whites have direct experience
with concentrated poverty schools, it is very important to examine
research about its effects.